Friday 3 March 2000 05.26 EST
First published on Friday 3 March 2000 05.26 EST

The historian David Irving was accused in the high court yesterday of "mocking the survivors and dead" of the Holocaust.

The allegation was made by the QC representing the academic Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books in their defence to Mr Irving's libel action against them over claims that he is a "Holocaust denier".

Richard Rampton put it to Mr Irving that by "mocking" eyewitness accounts during public speaking engagements, he was "appealing to, feeding, encouraging the most cynical radical anti-Semitism in your audience."

Mr Irving said that he was "mocking the liars" who had told untrue stories about what had happened to them.

Mr Rampton replied: "Oh, yes, but why the applause?"

Mr Irving, who is representing himself during his action before Mr Justice Gray, replied: "I am a good speaker."

Mr Irving, of Mayfair, central London, is seeking damages over Professor Lipstadt's 1994 book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, which he says has generated waves of hatred against him.

The defence alleges that Mr Irving's audiences often consisted of radical rightwing, neo-Nazi groups. Mr Rampton reminded the court of what Mr Irving had said to an audience in Canada in 1991. Mr Irving then stated: "I don't see any reason to be tasteful about Auschwitz. It's baloney, it's a legend. Once we admit the fact that it was a brutal slave labour camp and large numbers of people did die, as large numbers of innocent people died elsewhere in the war, why believe the rest of the baloney?

"I say quite tastelessly, in fact, that more women died on the back seat of Edward Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than ever died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz.

"Oh, you think that's tasteless, how about this? There are so many Auschwitz survivors going around, in fact the number increases as the years go past, which is biologically very odd to say the least. Because I'm going to form an association of Auschwitz survivors, survivors of the Holocaust and other liars, or the ASSHOLS."

Mr Irving said there were no "skinheads or extremists" in the audience, who looked like a "perfectly ordinary bunch of middle class Canadians".

Mr Irving rejects the accusation that he is a Holocaust denier, although he does question the number of Jewish dead and denies the systematic extermination of the Jews in concentration camps.